Name's Jason Thibeault. I'm an IT guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS, science of all stripes (especially space-related stuff), and debating on-line and off. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

Astrology on the radio, and Jamie Funk’s history purge

Who says online arguments are worthless? All right, so it probably depends on what you’re arguing about and who you’re arguing with, but even arguing with a bunch of astrologers over whether there’s any proof for astrology can teach you something. If nothing else, it can teach you how not to construct a valid argument over scientific evidence. Join Jason Thibeault (http://freethoughtblogs.com/lousycanuck/) and Stephanie Zvan (http://almostdiamonds.blogspot.com/) as they discuss what evidence there is for and against astrology, what evidence would be required to prove astrology, and what might happen if astrology were proven true.

Listen to AM 950 KTNF on Sunday at 9 a.m. Central to hear Atheists Talk, produced by Minnesota Atheists. Stream live online. Call in to the studio 952-946-6205, or send an e-mail to radio@mnatheists.org during the live show.

I’ll be posting a link to the podcast mp3 as soon as it’s up, as it’s a bit hard to tell you exactly what we talked about this shortly after the program. Suffice it to say I was nervous as all get-out, and we ended up overrunning our time so I couldn’t close with a poem that I really really wanted to read on the air.

Heh. Yes. I was going to read a poem on the air. Someone over at Funk Astrology posted a poem dedicated to me that I really wanted to read out loud, because it’s obvious that RevJ, the author, will go down in history as a scribe of our times.

* RevJ
* August 3rd, 2010 6:03am

Any Canuck who tries to debunk
Jamie and Marina Funk…is a punk.
And probably drunk as a skunk,
with junk in his trunk, and needs his head shrunk.
Matter of fact, Imma call this Canuck a Canunck!
lolsss

I would have even said “lollz”. It would have been a moment of unparalleled geekery on AM talk radio for years to come. Not that I didn’t geek out when August Berkshire, the director for the show and atheist speaker extraordinaire, e-mailed in a question that I had to answer on the fly.

… a nice big 404 error! Looks like the post was deleted after the move. I’ve archived the post and comment thread on the original site, in case it ever disappears permanently. At which point, I’ll have to host the mirror locally and link to it on my astrology debunking posts, because I really hate it when people try to make their actions disappear down the memory hole. Intentionally causing internet bit-rot to cover up for your own errors is anathema to my philosophy of how the internet should work to better humankind.

You’ve got to be kidding. You’re posting with “Darkstar” as your last name now? I assume to rebrand yourself. The last thing you’d want to do, then, is make sure you’re Google-indexed on this site under your new name, I’d have expected. You know, since you seem so keen on eliminating any of the association you’ve had with me on your old blog.

That google search has darkstarastrology in it. Like I said, the original post is still at funkastrology, always has been. If you had googled the title of the blog you would have been taken to funkastrology. You stated “since you seem so keen on eliminating any of the association you’ve had with me on your old blog.” That’s not true, an untruth, a lie.

In other words, you don’t plan on keeping it up forever. In other words, you deliberately deleted it from the new site because it’s NOT going to stay up forever, and you don’t care to have your more assholish acts associated with your new name.

I guess I’d better grab archival copies for every post on your old site that you might not like people to remember.

Given that my comments described your behavior toward Jason and my reaction to this behavior, there’s a lot of leeway for more pleasant. That still doesn’t explain what you meant to convey with that video. It also doesn’t explain why you’d want to show up again here, where your comments are permanent, and tie your fresh, shiny new name to the same old behavior.

Thanks, Yakaru. We were running long on time, otherwise we were totally intending on bringing in your discussion of what might happen if it proved true. It was even teased in the name of the show. Who knows, maybe a part 2 might materialize. We certainly have enough left-over material for it!

The host? Well what can one say? A deeply moving performance that was at once poignant and powerful, understated yet inspiring…A tour de force that lives on in the memory, especially when people follow the link to my blog…!

So, I see that Jamie Funk, aka Funkstar, aka Darkstar, or should we say Flunkstar and Dorkstar, has reared his silly head on some obscure Canadian blog, and not only made a fool of himself, but proved again that he has no real grasp on the vast topic of astrology.

The Dorkstar does not speak for “astrology,” nor does he qualify as an “astrologer,” unless of course one means in that cartoonish sense, like how Paula Abdul contributes to the great history of music with her lofty seat on American Piehole — it’s a known fact in LA that Paula simply cannot sing. Her vocal tracks were processed with pitch-adjusting tools. The raw versions are simply awful.

But, think about it, only someone as daft and unscholarly as Dorkstar would embarrass himself so much in public so often, inspiring ridicule across the “Internets” among the many real pros who have been on the cutting edge of astrology, and spent the better part of their lives devoted to the matter.

As for Dorkstar, he finally got around to getting a computer a few years ago, and I guess took up astrology around the same time. He thinks he’s brilliant, and anyone who does not is surely a demon in disguise.

The only thing about astrology that Jamie has proven is that anyone, and I mean ANYONE, can pretend to be an astrologer because by and large the general public has no clue what astrology entails.

I could go on, but it’s the weekend, so I’ll spend more time on the matter if our Canadian friend permits.

Yes, let’s DO HAVE a real debate on astrology, but this time WITH A QUALITY ASTROLOGER.

– Ed

Trackbacks

[…] so all the old associations slide off your back. Blackwater did it by renaming themselves Xe, and Jamie Darkstar used to be called Jamie Funk — neither entities changed their ways, merely their branding. […]

[…] Just over a year ago, Jason tangled with a couple of astrologers over at Lousy Canuck about proving the usefulness of astrology. Well, we both did, but Jason did almost all the heavy lifting. I mostly just had to put up with one of them spoiling a Kylie Minogue song in order to tell me he couldn’t get me out of his mind. (Yeah, still creepy, even now.) It was so illustrative of the problems with pseudoscience that we did a radio show about it and epic enough that one of the astrologers changed his name, moved his blog, and got rid of any mention of Jason. […]

[…] if you exclude Jamie “Darkstar” Funk of Dark Star Astrology (who has since attempted to shed his association with his ridiculous arguments here by changing his name). And to make matters worse, it appears to […]